The Empty Rooms of Eden FINAL Edition

• Published in: The Washington post
• Main Author: Bolton-Fasman, Judith
• Format: Newspaper Article
• Language: English
• Published: Washington, D.C WP Company LLC d/b/a The Washington Post 03.01.1999
• Subjects: Novels; Pollack, Eileen
• ISSN: 0190-8286

That attachment to places like the Concord in the Catskills' Borscht Belt is what made the region so special to American Jewish culture. Eileen Pollack instinctively knows this about her native place and conveys it to great effect in her fiction. That uncanny ability was evident in her debut book, The Rabbi in the Attic, a collection of short stories notable for their insight and humanity, and for Pollack's gifts for language and observation. It is 1979, and 19-year-old Lucy Applebaum, the novel's narrator, has dropped out of her sophomore year at New York University, answering a call to become the proprietor and ultimately the savior of the Eden, her family's dilapidated Catskills hotel. Among the things Lucy must contend with are a bumbling staff and an assortment of eccentric guests; the latter include a group of elderly communists who incite the staff to stage an unsuccessful strike. Pollack occasionally verges on stereotypes, and the Eden becomes a less interesting place when anthropologists and historians trudge through, treating it as a world on the edge of extinction. She does, however, succeed in portraying the Eden as distinctive. Here is a place where biblical allusions to the original Eden, as reflected in the town's name (Paradise) and even Lucy's surname (which translates as apple tree), are ironic rather than cloying. And yet this is a world in which sentiment and nostalgia are intrinsic features. Lucy uses both to attract new guests with brochures that beckon them to "find out what your grandparents saw in the Catskills." At first, a number of people do just that and the Eden is booked solid.